Quotes about Inclusion

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

We are all God's people. We are prejudiced and we separate into Jews, Mexicans, Italians, but God doesn't see colors.

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

To hope for a better future in this world—for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful, and wounded world—is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to the gospel as an afterthought.

Wherever he went, he was celebrating the arrival of God's kingdom, as often as not by partying with people who would normally be excluded because of their apparently shady moral background. Wherever

Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the "forgiveness of sins." If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are "Gentile sinners," then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah "gave himself for our sins.

The divine intention, as Paul saw it unveiled in the messianic events concerning Jesus, was to create a single worldwide family; and therefore any practices that functioned as symbols dividing different ethnic groups could not be maintained as absolutes within this single family.

In the New Testament it is clear: because of Christ and the Spirit, every single Christian is welcome at any time to come before the Father himself. If you have a royal welcome awaiting you in the throne room itself, for whatever may be on your heart and mind, whether great or small, why would you bother hanging around the outer lobby trying to persuade someone there, however distinguished, to go in and ask for you?

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no 'male and female'; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus."15 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later. But the truth they express was already contained within Ananias's opening greeting.

Reductionism is like a kid who argues that whatever does not fit into his toy box is not a toy.

It is not my ambition to marry a white woman or swim in a white pool. It is political equality that we want.